The need to convert analog signals into the digital domain has resulted in various analog to digital converter technologies. One of the most successful has been the switched capacitor array successive approximation converter. The most common variant of this converter performs a binary search through a search space. The converter searches through the search space very quickly but requires multiple capacitors to be provided and be carefully weighted with respect to one another. Care has to be taken to maintain linearity.
Another converter type which has found favour, especially in audio applications, is the sigma-delta converter. This often uses a single bit digital to analog converter to provide a coarse signal which is subtracted from the analog signal to be converted, the resulting difference signal is integrated and the integrated signal is quantised, typically by a 1 bit quantiser, whose output either is or is used to drive the digital to analog converter. As only a single bit DAC is used, then errors due to internal mismatch are much reduced compared to a successive approximation converter. The downside is that for a given Nyquist frequency the sigma-delta converter must be clocked much more quickly.
It has been noted that, as the successive approximation routine, SAR, conversion approaches the least significant bit then noise and quantisation errors can become significant. WO2007/021600 describes a SAR converter where following completion of a full conversion, the last few bit trials are re-done, each as an independent SAR conversion and the results are averaged. In each of the re-done SAR conversions the conversion is effectively independent of any preceding or succeeding conversion. Thus, if there are any integrators in the SAR decision making chain, the or each integrator is reset for each bit trial.